Friday, November 16, 2012

One of the most important performance features in Postgres 9.2 is index-only scans: the ability for certain types of queries to be performed without retrieving data from tables, potentially greatly reducing the amount of I/O needed. I recently completely overhauled the Index-only scans PostgreSQL wiki page, so that the page is now targeted at experienced PostgreSQL users that hope to get the most out of the feature.

My apologies to the authors of the feature, Robert Haas, Ibrar Ahmed, Heikki Linnakangas and Tom Lane, if my handling of the topic seems to focus on the negatives. Any reasonable article about any given index-only scan implementation would have to extensively discuss that implementation's limitations. Any discussion of Postgres index-only scans that focussed on the positives would be much shorter, and would essentially just say: "Index-only scans can make some of your queries go much faster!".